Winning Can Sometimes Be A Problem

I read this blog entry during the A to Z Challenge about TSR, the company that the founders of Dungeons & Dragons originally created.  A few days before that I had also watched BlackBerry, the story of Research in Motion who created the BlackBerry smartphone.  I noticed the similarity where both companies started out as just a few nerds getting together and making something cool--role-playing games and electronics--but once they had a big success, things started to fall apart.  And you can add a lot of other companies to that list like Apple.

While I don't think most of us would say that winning is bad, it does tend to create problems.  TSR, RiM, Apple, etc. have some success and then within a few years tensions start to rise.  Where once you had a small group who could basically do what they wanted because no one cared, now there are employees, investors, the press, the government, and of course fans to answer to.  Success creates a need to keep coming up with new product, which creates pressure, especially when the new product isn't as successful.  And then if you already had some personality conflicts, that can lead to division.  TSR and Apple both fired a key founder in the mid-80s--Gary Gygax and Steve Jobs respectively.  One of RiM's lesser founders left in 2007, which turned out to be good for him as he cashed out just before RiM's stock tanked.

And of course it's not only in the corporate world.  Think of the Beatles.  They started as just four teens in Liverpool playing pubs and other small gigs.  Then suddenly they're the biggest band in the world.  That created pressures and personality conflicts that led to their breakup.

Or think of sports.  When a team wins a championship, it's great, but once the celebration is over then there's the pressure to do it again.  Very few teams can do it again because it is so difficult.  To do it 3 times or 4 times in a row is nearly impossible, which is why so few have done it.

If you don't like sports, business, or the Beatles, think of Star Wars.  After the first movie (Episode IV) the Rebels blew up the Death Star.  Now what?  That was the question everyone was wondering after the movie became such a big hit.  I think Lucas and the writers got it right in that they knew they couldn't keep the status quo.  Han and Chewie couldn't go back to smuggling.  Luke couldn't go back to Tatooine.  Leia definitely couldn't go back to Alderaan.  So they had Luke learn to be a Jedi and then find out his father is Darth Vader.  Han and Leia start getting romantically involved--until Han is captured and put into carbonite.

What Disney struggled with was after Episode VI the Rebels had blown up another Death Star and the Emperor and Vader were dead.  Now what?  Because they gave themselves so little time to do anything, they just tried to vaguely throw something together and it wound up being pretty disappointing.  They basically did exactly what I said not to do after Episode IV by essentially regressing the original characters to where they began.

In books--especially a series--you have this problem.  Your characters might "win" but that only means more obstacles lie ahead.  And unless you're writing something like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys or something like that, you aren't going to keep things static.  Characters and their world should continue to grow and change.  The hero(es) should face new threats and more difficult challenges.

In the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series, characters die, other characters are added, Emma has three different jobs, gives birth to one child, and adopts another one.  I kept raising the stakes in her world to create drama and conflict.  And as I say, there's really no going back.  Emma couldn't just go back to how she was at the start of the first book.

In the Chances Are series, the changes were often literal.  Steve becomes Stacey in book one.  Then in book two Stacey becomes a child and then a woman again.  In book three she becomes a child, an old woman, a man, and then back to a woman.  We did sort of retcon her body back to the original Stacey, but the rest of her world had changed as well.  Not many characters died but Dr. Palmer became a tween, Maddy became a little girl and then a chubby woman who found out her best friend was really her "dead" father.  And of course Stacey fell in love with her therapist and married him.  Maddy finally married her long-time girlfriend Grace who even got pregnant with Stacey's husband donating his sperm.

In the Girl Power series, there were literal changes for most of the characters.  Also at the end of the third book, much of the world has been devastated, so when I did sequel short stories and a spinoff book, characters had to adjust to this new world.

In the Children of Eternity series there are literal changes as Samantha and her friends grow up a little more with each book.  Also with each book, Samantha finds more clues about her past.  The island of Eternity's world grows as well when they finally go to the mainland and find out about modern times.  Unlike when Reverend Crane was running the place, they couldn't just wipe their memories and reboot every time they started to remember stuff.

To use a series that isn't one of mine, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series starts out sort of like Star Wars (which came out years later) with young Taran living on a farm as an "assistant pig keeper."  Through the first three books he meets a bratty princess (who is not his sister), a king/bard, a warrior prince, and a weird creature called a Gurgi.  They have some adventures and Taran learns about the real world and what it is to be a hero.  Then in the fourth book he goes off on a quest to learn about himself and winds up learning a couple of trades like blacksmithing and starts to become more of a mature adult.  Then in the final book, he (spoiler alert) finds out he's the heir to the High King's throne.  So the world of Prydain and the characters kept growing and changing.  (Other people would probably use the Harry Potter books there, or maybe Narnia, LOTR, or Oz, but whatever.  It's my blog.)

The point being that like in the real world, in stories your hero "winning" usually creates more obstacles and complications.  As the author you want to keep raising the stakes to create the drama to fuel the plots.  Especially in a series there's usually the pressure to do more, to go bigger.  That can be hard to do sometimes.

Sometimes someone might try to go smaller and it's not really a good idea.  Like Alien3 where they went from the big military battles of Aliens to more of a claustrophobic slasher movie in space like Alien.  And also they killed almost all of the characters who survived Aliens.  Generally people hated it because it was trying to lower the stakes, trying to go back to the first one instead of expanding.

Halloween (2018) did the same thing.  After various attempts to expand the franchise, this basically reset everything back to the first movie--or tried to.  And it was really boring--at least to me.

Rocky V sort of did the same thing.  Instead of fighting for a heavyweight championship or fighting to avenge his dead friend, Rocky Balboa fought...some guy in a street.  It was really a downer and eventually even Stallone had to admit it and backtrack with Rocky Balboa in 2006.

Which really in movies and comics especially if you screw up your series, you usually wind up having to hit the reset button with a reboot or soft reboot.  For a really long-running series like Superman, Batman, or James Bond that is probably inevitable because it's hard to keep anything going for 85 years without a few reboots along the way.  So story universes are not like the universe itself, which is infinite or nearly so; there is a finite point where they hit the wall and you've basically gone as far as you can go and either have to quit or reboot.  Sales figures usually tell publishers, movie studios, etc. where that is.

It's like in Last Action Hero when the kid tells the fictional Jack Slater that the sequels will keep going and keep getting tougher until the grosses go down.  Which is great for the audience but kinda sucks for the characters.

Some food for thought.